Thin Line
by GreenCay
Summary: The unlikely collision of two people whose lives are defined by opposite ends of the same paradoxical thread. Love verses hate; Gaara verses Tayuya.


**Disclaimer:** I've often wondered if these were really necessary as surely purely posting fiction on here is a site wide disclaimer. I tried to look it up and the answers were indeterminate. It would seem a disclaimer within a site like this is simply to be safer by a negligible degree within the legal ambiguity where one is more than likely going to be overlooked by being thoroughly insignificant. Though I wonder if that negligible degree more of safety is maintained when authors play with their disclaimer. Perhaps in the pursuit of creativity? A break of monotony? Surely this must occur to them, therefore is the disclaimer simply a ritualised tradition? A superstition? An inside joke? A fond pastime? So many questions, all of them fastidious, none of them interesting. Anyway, yes, this is indeed the work of a fan, done for fun, without profit.

* * *

The heavy door to the detention centre clicked shut with a stern echo of trapped air. Temari strode down the hall, her purposeful steps strained with hinted aggravation. Arriving at the cell where the perpetrator was kept she peered through the bars at the figure within, her face expressionless save for a tight little frown.

The prisoner wore a standard Suna uniform and flak jacket, though the top of it had been badly ripped. The wrappings which had been concealing the face were torn apart too where her brother had unmasked his assailant. Temari's frown twisted, pleased and simultaneously frightened by the brutality of the unmasking, as several lacerations stood out on the prisoner's face still weeping a little blood through the clotting. It wasn't like him, not anymore. Gaara had not been quite himself lately.

Similar height and build, identical attire, Temari could only imagine how he must have been reminded of his first night-time visitor those many years ago, but this was certainly not the ghost of Yashamaru. A shock of fuchsia hair stuck every which way through the torn face coverings. And the face itself was the very opposite of Yahsamaru's which had hid its secrets beneath an immaculate softness. This girl's eyes bled a steady ooze of daggers, there was nothing hidden about her malevolence.

"Who are you?" Temari began, her tone completely level and cold.

The girl took her time to regard Temari without expression, and then she scoffed a little as she replied, "Bitch, Don't recognise me?"

Temari's eyes narrowed reflexively at the girl's belligerence, taking a few more seconds to take in her appearance, if she was familiar it was so faint as to not have been properly committed to memory, "Should I?"

The girl smiled, "No, I'm not surprised, you may have fucking killed me before you got a good look at me," as an afterthought she muttered somewhat bitterly, "I looked different too."

Temari's brow furrowed as her mind scrambled for any association, that hair was somehow familiar... And then she recalled the flute they had confiscated, knocked from her hands by Gaara's attack. She'd been using it to perform some kind of Genjutsu they'd deduced… From the state of her little brother she had even suspected this may not have been her first nightly visit. It was on this subject that she had hoped to quiz the prisoner.

"You're from Ottogakure," Temari stated at last, certainty solidifying in her tone, it had been so long she hadn't thought to make the connection.

"Was, Ottogakure no longer exists," the prisoner replied with a hint of distaste.

Feeling her anger rise again, Temari mirrored the girl's antipathy in her cold response, "No and neither should you, I must not have buried you under enough trees."

The girl smiled again, the crass insolent smirk of the arrogant, "Oh, I was quite dead for some time, or near enough. I owe my new existence like so many others to the benevolence of that shitty rat Kabuto. May his sadistic joke of a soul burn in hell."

"Not very grateful are you," Temari commented blandly, noting absently that the girl irritated her.

"I'd rather be dead than weak. Kabuto used the chakra embedded in my cursed seal to heal me, the process removed it. He can't resist healing when it causes pain simultaneously. Sick shit. Gratitude would be fucking redundant."

The girl was being curiously overt for a prisoner but Temari found she didn't much care, it was time to get to the point, "What we're you doing outside my brother's bedroom."

In answer that same smirk cut its way slowly across the girls face.

"Well?" Temari resisted the urge to roll her eyes, she hated games and time wasters.

"Well," the girl spat, leaning back against her cell wall, eyes taking on a calculating glint. "I've been on the road since my 'revival'…not really a missing-nin since there's no longer a hidden sound to miss me. I've been searching for power, for what I came to the sound to find, for what Kabuto took from me, for what I now have to find alone."

Temari gazed blandly through the bars, schooling her patience and willing the girl to get to the point.

"I've been refining my technique …I can absorb hateful demonic energy, seal it, summon it, control it…For years now I have travelled between countries collecting such energies, I have added legions of demons to my Doki."

The prisoner leant forward with a sly air edged in ill intention. "These demons are manifestations, manifestations of the deep writhing hatred collected from _people_. Everyone has a little, but some…some have so much more."

Temari took an involuntary step backwards as the girl appeared at the bars smirking so that her teeth flashed, "So, why do you think I was outside the room of your monstrous fucking brother?"

The kazekage's sister let out a single contemptuous guffaw, "You know nothing."

"I know enough, you think people really change? Delusion is the close cousin of illusion, and illusion is my specialty. What you believe, what he believes, it's a fake and fragile web held together by lies. Pick it apart and all that demonic energy is still there, waiting to be harvested."

There was something a little unhinged about the girl's laugh, particularly paired with her gored appearance, "and the funniest thing? The funniest thing is that this dormant volcano is now the corner stone of your village."

So that was it, this assailant had been attacking her brothers mind, to increase her own power and in doing so simultaneously deliver a potentially devastating blow to the sand. "So this was revenge?"

The prisoner leant on the bars of her cell and curled her lip as she gave Temari a sideways look. "Revenge is a sentimental preoccupation for hysterical idiots."

Blond eyebrows rose "Oh?" Temari paused, "so why take such a risk? That you could fail?" she almost smiled, "and now you have."

"Perhaps I got bored, some gambles are worth it." The girl replied with odd complacency, she leant forward in mock confidentiality, "Perhaps, I haven't failed."

Temari turned to leave, her tolerance at an end for now, she had a clearer picture now, enough to work with. She needed to speak to Gaara, but before she did she decided to indulge one last pleasantry, "I never knew your name?"

The prisoner paused before answering in blank reticence, "Tayuya."

Temari did hope this was the last visit she'd ever pay to this twisted brat kunoichi, she even hoped justice would be swift and final considering all that had been confessed. She spoke slowly and deliberately, "Goodbye, Tayuya."


End file.
